-- A Cyberspace Review Of The Arts

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade

What do you do after you've overthrown everyone's notions of art back to the Parthenon, impugned Western Civilization, and caused assassinations and revolutions? Or are alleged to have done so, greatly to your sales advantage if not your artistic reputation?

Andy Warhol, or at least his reputation, faced this question in the later years of his life. After you've shaken everything by bringing a sculpture of a box of Brillo, identical visually to its models, into a high-art gallery and said, "This is Art", and made it stick, you probably can't just bring another box of Brillo in next week and next year and so on. The first box was the one with the Pow! Further Brillo boxes would soon become a standing, rather corny joke. "Okay, Brillo, we get it, Andy," bored cognoscenti would soon be murmuring.

Before long Warhol said he had given up painting (another put-on.) He was going to make movies and photograph-based society portraits.

Fibers

Actually, Warhol never stopped painting, and never stopped being artistically authentic and "original" in spite of all the put-ons and put-downs. The world, however, had changed; he was one of those who had changed it. And so asked to do an illustration for a fabric manufacturer, he tangled up a lot of wool, took a picture, silkscreened it, and turned out something that had the looks, even the rhythm, of one of Jackson Pollock's better pieces.

At one time, a trick like that would have made a stir in the art world. But by the time it was shown, although it might be great art, it could no longer shock anyone. The bourgeoisie still wanted to be properly epatéed and they weren't going to get it from a Pollock knock-off, however clever. But it's art -- the art part of art, rather than the commerce, the social standing, the celebrity, the mystification. And besides being an enfant terrible, a "holy terror", and the scourge of Western Civilization, Warhol was also a "real" artist, and one interested in such things has some reason to go to the show at the Brooklyn Museum. What they will see is always interesting and sometimes moving.

"Rorschach"

This is is not to say that the Old Warhol is completely missing. Not abandoning the Duchampian ethos completely, and in fact referring rather pointedly back to the works of "R. Mutt", Warhol and his friends pissed on a collection of pure copper plates and pigments which then turned into various shades of splashy green and blue the way copper does when it's exposed to something exciting. A little further down the aleatic road, Warhol and company made some rather imposing "Rorschachs" -- those staples of 1950s pop psychology and innumerable jokes of the era ("I don't know, Doc -- you're the one with the dirty pictures!") These Rorschachs are several feet high and wide and tend to dominate whatever space they're in with their mysterious, symmetrical, abstract forms. Pictures of Warhol making the paintings assure us that they were pretty random, just the folded paper with an ink blot in the middle, but on a very large scale.

There are quite a few 'camouflage' paintings which are another excursion into total, seemingly free-form abstraction, and yet they are obviously quite carefully done in military style, presaging the military theater of our own era.

There are also a number of large blow-ups of very small parts of photographs of ordinary objects which, because of the degree of magnification and severity of the cropping, look like pure abstract art (and in most cases, even when we know what they are, do not yield represented objects to the viewer.) Most photographers have manipulated their prints to some extent, whether in the developing pan and the enlarger or more recently in their computers; these paintings represent that bag of tricks being taken to its natural limit and placed on a very large scale, with results that would delight the Abstract Expressionists, or at least make them very jealous.

"Warhol/Clemente/Basquiat: The Origin of Cotton"

Besides the move toward Ab-Ex and minimalism, Warhol also explored the world of graffiti: there is are a series of collaborations with Basquiat and others. These tend to be large playful monsters and they look mostly Basquiatish rather than Warholian to me. Typically Warhol would screen something and then let Basquiat work out over the screen print. However, Warhol later said that Basquiat had gotten him interested in painting again, so he must have picked up a brush or two during the process.

One aspect of the late works is the appearance of religious images and motifs. Warhol was always interested in the most popular images and it is not remarkable that he chose cheap reproductions of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" to work from, particularly the image of Jesus which is at its center, which he drew or traced in elementary outline form from a reproduction and then used repeatedly. The Da Vinci painting shows the moment when Jesus reveals to his apostles that he will be betrayed by one of them; while the apostles recoil in confusion, Jesus himself looks down and a bit to the side, apparently resigned to his fate. This image is used over and over again in a surprising variety of contexts.

Christ 112 Times

: One of the more striking examples of his religious work is "Christ 112 Times", Christ being the detail of Da Vinci's 'Last Supper' mentioned above in a golden yellowish orange on a black or very dark background. Each of the Christ-images is about 20 inches high by 16 inches wide, and they are arranged in a grid 4 images high and 28 wide, so the size of the overall painting is 6 2/3 feet high and 35 feet wide. The museum displays this gigantic painting to great advantage in a large room on the 5th floor, so arranged that as you walk towards the room and enter it, it is as if curtains were pulled back dramatically to the side and the whole is suddenly revealed in all its power. Next to it is a more conventional series of copies of the Last Supper; the image of the black-and-white reproduction is doubled and painted over a brilliant pink or yellow ground; the color modifies and further distances the reproduction of the reproduction from the viewer.

It is tempting to treat Pop Art as almost entirely ironical, regardless of the talk about love of beer cans and gas stations in the sunset glow. However, it is doubtful whether Warhol's religious paintings can be fully understood in this light. In spite of all the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll going on around him, Warhol was an observant Byzantine Catholic, a frequent churchgoer, as had been his Rusyn parents. Having come face to face with violent death, he may well have had his mind on eternal things throughout the later period of his life.

In spite of all this, an ironic -- maybe doubly ironic -- note can be found in some of the religious works. In one case Christ-images repeatedly overlay motorcycles, corporate logos, and what looks like supermarket advertising. Does this mean Jesus is just another product? In another installation (not at this show, but in the catalog) there is a sequence of punching bags designed along with Basquiat, each with the same image of Christ on it. Most strikingly, an advertisement for a cheap home-study course in boxing showing a crouching boxer is overlaid with the Christ image; the latter comes through only after one first sees the boxer. Part of the advertisement is the slogan "BE SOMEBODY WITH A BODY." We have not only the contrast between a young pugilistic man eager to make his mark in the world and the resigned, pacifistic Christ, who perhaps we are supposed to punch or think of as a puncher with "A BODY" but we are reminded as well that in the early centuries of Christianity Roman Catholicism struggled with Arianism and Gnosticism to establish a concept of Christ which was at once fully divine and fully human, so that the physical existence and sufferings of Jesus became a primary aspect of the Church's teachings.

While Warhol was probably not a student of early Church history (although you never know) he would certainly have been reminded of the physicality of Christ by his religious upbringing. Every time Warhol went to mass, he would have heard the priest intone 'This is my body ...' during the ritual of Communion. Therefore, presenting Christ superimposed on a boxer, or on a boxer's punching bag, is a kind of irony, but it is not lightly or dismissively ironic; instead, the viewer finds that his own concept of Christ or at least of the Christ-figure has been profoundly challenged. If it is irony it is a very deep sort of irony.

In the same room are some large paintings made from one of Warhol's favorite self-portrait images, one with a dire expression on his face and his wig askew, some of the strands of hair standing straight up in the air. Most striking among these is one in which, over a violet ground, the image is doubled by superimposing a positive and a negative screen of the photograph on the canvas. One can't help but be reminded of Man Ray's famous double image of Countess Luisa Casati.

Besides these impressive paintings, the museum has put up some Interview covers and is showing some of Warhol's television programs in a roomful of monitors. These are quite popular, but I think they belong more to the celebrity-infested middle period of Warhol's artistic evolution than to the late paintings. There are also some revisitings of works from an earlier period, like a 2 x 2 Black Marilyn.

It's nice to see that the Brooklyn Museum has rescued Warhol the great painter and designer from the shadow of Warhol the Holy Terror and Warhol the Pop metacelebrity. The latter may draw crowds and make for best-sellers, but art-the-real-thing belongs to the former.